Tag: politics

What’s happening now? Tracking the political actions affecting cultural institutions | May 14, 2025

Over the last several months, the attacks on cultural institutions have been relentless. I’ve been tracking political actions affecting museums and other linked institutions on a public document for a few weeks, but that action feels too little for the scale of assault on our institutions so I’m going to dust off the ol’ blog to try to connect the dots about what’s been happening. My focus will be on the actions in the US, but not exclusively so. Political actions affect cultural institutions everywhere and can bleed over from one context to another. I’m still feeling out how regularly I’m going to post and the kind and scale of update I’ll be sharing, but I’m inspired by Liz Neeley’s great missives figuring out what to focus on now & next in science and higher ed.

On Thursday, May 8, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden was fired with a two-line email, stating that her position was terminated effective immediately. The first woman and the first African American to hold the position, Hayden was confirmed in September 2016 by President Barack Obama and had one year left on her term. On Saturday, May 10, the Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter received notification that her position was also terminated. Permutter lead the U.S. Copyright Office (a position appointed by the Librarian of Congress). The day before she was notified of her dismissal, the Copyright Office issued part three of a pre-publication report on AI that included questions about the use of copyrighted materials in the training of AI systems––notably of interest to Elon Musk. By Monday, May 12, it was announced that Todd Blanche, the lawyer who represented President Trump during his 2024 criminal trial had been appointed acting Librarian of Congress, although LOC staff members pushed back on the change, reportedly preventing two officials that Blanche had appointed to senior roles from accessing the agency’s headquarters. Now Congressional Democrats have requested an investigation into “the possible unauthorized transfer of congressional or Library data to executive branch agencies and personnel.” (H/t @ChrisGeidner, who has his own piece on the events online) Meanwhile, Rolling Stone has a piece out featuring an unnamed “expert” on the LOC, who raised questions about Trump’s access to the LOC’s Congressional Research Service (CRS), which “provides confidential advice to Congress, including confidential legal advice, and there is a database that has all the questions that every member has asked for the last 50 years and the answers.” That sounds like the kind of data that needs to be protected.

It’s not just personnel under attack at the LOC. On May 12, Ryan Cordell shared on Bluesky that the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) has been shut down.

Some sad confirmation from @bcgl.bsky.social while I was at UW last week—the National Digital Newspaper Program—which builds Chronicling America—has been shut down Historical newspapers are probably the archival material most used by the general public—for genealogy, local history—it’s such a loss

[image or embed]— Ryan Cordell (@ryancordell.org) May 12, 2025 at 10:28 AM

NDNP was a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), and it just one of many, many important projects at risk. Tribal libraries are also feeling the pressure from cuts. On May 11, NBC reported that the Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS) had notified “more than a hundred libraries on federally recognized tribal lands across the country that… their congressionally appropriated grant had been terminated midcycle.” It’s not an exaggeration to note that the implications of these cuts will be significant.

There is some good news, however. Yesterday, Rhode Island district court judge John J. McConnell Jr. issued a preliminary injunction to halt the elimination of IMLS and two other federal agencies in a case brought by 21 states’ attorneys general, writing that “the States have demonstrated irreparable and continuing harm from the Defendants’ de facto dismantling of IMLS, MBDA, and FMCS.” Publishers Weekly have a helpful write up.

Alondra Nelson’s public resignation from the National Science Foundation and Library of Congress should be required reading for anyone thinking about how they can use the power they have in this moment:

Exit (leaving) and voice (speaking up) need not be mutually exclusive strategies. My resignations are both, an exit that amplifies the voice of others. By departing these advisory roles, I aim to speak more clearly in my own language about what they have become and what they ought to be. This is not an abandonment of loyalty to these institutions’ missions, but rather, its highest expression.

Taking a different approach, the Authors Guild and a group of scholars and writers announced that they have “filed a class action lawsuit (PDF) against the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), its leadership, and officials within the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) for unlawfully terminating millions of dollars in committed grants from funds appropriated by Congress for the programs.” Meanwhile, if your institution has been affected by NEH cuts, the Association for Computers and the Humanities, have been offering advice on supporting and advocating for the NEH, including creating a website measuring the impact of the NEH Grants 2025.

Long-time museum advocates Gretchen Jennings and Rose Paquet have just launched a new substack called Museums Act Together to be a hub for information and support. They plan to “[share] information about museums and other cultural institutions that are being defunded, censored, or otherwise pressured to shift from presenting authentic and well researched content” and “[publish] accounts from museums that wish to share (publicly or anonymously) their challenges and responses.” Their first post has a ton of links and resources.

Finally, I leave you with words from Kaitlyn Greenidge’s recent piece, Why We Need the National Endowment for the Arts:

We are in a cultural moment where critical thinking has become synonymous with cynicism. Our government and larger media have spent decades telling us that the anxiety and desperation and deep loneliness that characterize most of American life doesn’t ultimately matter when the economy is doing great. The instinct, in the face of so much of American life denying reality, is to fall into the reflex of calling things out, of meeting every gesture of expression with a sneer. But that is not how anything is repaired. To resolve, to move forward, to understand in any way, means at a certain point you have to declare what it is that you actually care about, what you actually want to fight for.

I know what I’m fighting for.

Is there something that you think that should be included in future posts? Get in touch.

Thoughts on the closure of the Dutch Museum of National History

My first guest geek Jasper Visser (don’t worry – there’s another geek speak coming soon) has just announced on his blog that his museum – the Dutch Museum of National History (INNL) – will no longer operate from 1 January 2012, following the announcement of funding cuts by Netherlands’ secretary of state responsible for culture.

This is a terribly disappointing – although not entirely surprising – thing to have happened. When I first met Jasper at MW2011, I spoke to him a little bit about the INNL network – the museum website that won the Best of the Web award for innovation – and at the time, he mentioned that it was possible that his institution could close at any time. I dismissed the possibility… coming from Australia, where our politicians are generally fairly centrist in action if not always in rhetoric, I didn’t really take seriously the threat that someone might close such an interesting and innovative project for seemingly political reasons.** And yet only months later, here we are.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to Seb about the INNL and he remarked how vulnerable it was, being a national museum in a politically unstable country, and moreso being a museum without objects. And its true. After all, our very concept of what a museum is and should be is grounded in the fact that museums are the places that house objects. In Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums, Ken Arnold writes (p4) that early museums had three strategies for creating knowledge, being “the telling of stories, the use of objects, and the imposition of order upon them.” The INNL did use objects – like the National Vending Machine, or selected objects through which stories could be told – but it did not house a permanent collection. Instead, it sought to excite people about Dutch national history through stories and projects. And with concepts like “The ‘Land of What If’, a room with alternative Dutch histories”, no wonder it was vulnerable at a time when cultural institutions were threatened by politics.

Despite – and possibly because of – its short life, the INNL raises lots of questions for me about the nature of museums, and what a museum is and should be. Can a museum preserve the past without objects? Does the provenance of a museum come from the provenance of its objects, or its people?

As much as I love and am captured by the ideas behind the INNL, I wonder whether it was always going to be a time-limited project. Reading the vision of the project, I always feel inspired – but without objects, a museum of this nature can only ever be as successful as the people who are behind it, and it is likely that with time and staff changes, a sense of inertia would gain hold.

Yet the fact that it was (or appeared to be) successful during its short life should absolutely inspire those of us working in museums with exhibits to consider how we too could excite people about what we do if we didn’t have our objects to rely on – if we were forced to find new and more creative ways to tell stories.

In the mean time, I’m not sure what Jasper plans to do – or if he will stick around in this field… He has something of the entrepreneurial/world changing spirit about him and I imagine he might want to move on. But I look forward to seeing what he turns his hand to next.

**NB: I’ve recently learned that funding has been cut for This is Not Art – an arts festival that runs annually in my home town. This year might be the first year in over a decade that it doesn’t run, and I am fairly sure that the reasons behind this are political as well… so maybe even in Aust, culture is never safe from politics.